SockMonkeyHolocaust:It's amazing how people forget that the internet has an "off" button that is readily accessible.

The problem isn't that you can't get away from the internet - it's that you can't get away from other mothers that have used the internet. The continued onslaught of questions and knowing looks makes you want to become among the most relcusive of hermits.

My kids are "sports age" now - the number of people running their kids to three or more different activities each week is staggering. Assuming a practice or two each week and a game (or two) - these kids have 20+ commitments each week.

My sister-in-law, who constantly complain of how busy she is, just signed her kids up for martial arts... 3x per week on top of everything else. Some people just need to learn how to say "enough already". But now my wife is asking me if we should sign our kids up.....

The fear is that your kid will somehow miss some life-altering experience - - - maybe they could be the next great soccer player, violinist, pottery artist, equestrian or whatever if only they had been exposed to it at an early enough age. You can't win - there's too much to do to expose you kid to it all by the time they turn 10. Find some stuff to do and raise you kids - don't let the TV do it, but realize you can't cover all the bases and trying will probably ruin your life.

My husband and I are planning to have a kid in the next year, so we've been borrowing friends' babies for overnight babysitting/practice. The two-week-old was the worst; poor little thing cried all night until we put some techno on the subwoofer for her (the plan was just to drown it out, but it actually put her right to sleep, so we burned her folks the CD,) and the three-month-old was absolutely precious until the diarrhea started...at which point we just moved the changing pad to right by the kitchen sink and used the sprayer-thingy to hose the little fellow off. Worked pretty darn well for the five-month-old with diaper rash, too.

There was a tense moment when the ten-month-old pooped bright green, but when husband admitted to feeding her a blue Slurpee to deal with the teething pain, that made perfect sense, and it turns out babies are just as wildly entertained by birds eating at the feeder through a window or fish in a tank as cats are, so we put part of the DVD budget toward birdseed and set the baby swing near the window the sparrows like. They also like Windows Media Player or WinAmp visualizations, so I've got a projector pointed at the ceiling above the crib and connected to an old WinXP desktop to keep Future Kid amused, like a geek baby mobile that won't whack you in the teeth when you go to check on 'em. We can also line up a webcam to keep an eye on kiddo when I'm working in the next room, should the need arise. And I've heard good things about cloth diapers as well as disposables. A Costco membership and some Velcro-butt baby covers ought to solve that problem.

See, I'm a tech-support geek and husband is an engineer. We have no idea what the appropriate tactics for baby maintenance are beyond vague memories of teenage babysitting and what our moms did with our siblings, but we're really good at guessing, and while it's evident from space that we'll do things that make 'real parents' go "You...but...that...wha-huh?" it does seem like we'll figure it out with or without advice. There's some element of instinct here, that and 'whatever works is cool.'

Also, why do the friends keep offering to pay us for use of the practice babies? Seems like all they ever do while we've got 'em is sleep.

I give one piece of advice to all the expecting fathers I meet. The first 6ish months with a new baby are a living hell. They are all work, no reward. Crying, eating, sleeping and pooping is all they do. Creatures of id. Anyone that says otherwise is deluding themselves. If you, the parents, didn't love the child so completely, you'd return them. It gets more rewarding after they start to smile, laugh and interact more.

The internet and my friends who have kid's very serious internet posts about parenting have taught me that if you don't spend all day with your kids, sleep with them (so you can't have sex), breast feed on demand, do everything on demand, use cloth diapers, yell about vaccines, have your kids rule your lives, and make them organic baby food then you are a bad parent. Also, how could you have a job when that's 8 hours you are not tending to the child's every whim? Also, you must post about feminism on facebook while doing this at a time of day when your grandmother would've been farking welding together B-17s.

PrinceOfPersia:Lexx: Question, kind folk: is there a way to become a parent without basically signing up for 2+ years of sleep deprivation?

Keep your baby well and plan its sleep properly. Treat colic properly, for God's sake, there's no need for a healthy baby to have it. Start feeding them a half-teaspoon of baby rice with their milk and sloooowly increase until they're basically on solids. Colic is intenstinal cramps because there's nothing solid in the guts to move, I'm surprised that adults have to be told this when almost all of us know what discomfort bad gas is, and how you bring it on easily with a liquid diet, high dairy, low fibre and all the other crap we expect a frigging baby to endure quietly. Don't be one of those idiots that leaves a baby with colic in the 21st century, if relieving your babies pain is not reason enough, you'll sleep because your baby can.

Seriously. I have twins who had colic, and adding rice to their milk/formula did absolutely nothing. Can you name any GI issue that is soothed by riding in a car or very loud white noise?

"Hey look, something I find objectionable and that causes me stress. Perhaps I'll just ignore it and instead base my life on my own internal values".

You only have so much energy to dedicate to various tasks.

If you have a newborn a lot of that energy is consumed by lack of sleep, doubt (am I doing it right? Is it normal that he ...) and the additional effort you need to put in just to keep everything afloat in your life. If you also keep getting bombarded with (conflicting) opinions and judgements you will eventually crack and let some things past the defences.

Some things are easy to filter, the internet is one of them. It takes very little effort not to go to baby message boards. Yet there are also items which will follow you around. Think about the online communities you are a part of, pulling out of those might be harder.

Television can also be hard to ignore since a lot of shows might show scenes in which parents do things you don't, but people did encourage you to do (which is not to say that that method is actually better for your sitution). You can zap away from baby programs, but stop watching every show in which a baby features at some point and you might have to drop quite a few favourites.

Family, friends and the strangers at the bus stop (never underestimate the amount of people who want to talk about babies) are harder because you can't live life as a shut in for the first 12 years of the child's life. Even if you de manage to get everyone to shut up eventually, you will still have been exposed to a ton of information in those first few weeks/months. Even if you manage to produce a perfectly average person you'll hear people talking about how their James got into Harvard, and oh, your child didn't? Did you play classical music while he was in the womb? No? Well, there you have it.

Having choices isn't always a good thing. Especially if you need to read up on all the various pros and cons before making a decision on schools, electricity, internet providers, the use of soy, the cheapest health care provider which still fits your needs, cars, pets, cell phone plans, least evil politician (judges, police, local government, state and federal), medicine (ask your doctor if X is good for you!) etc. Now add in the shiatload of options for each category and all the reading you are expected to do to make an informed choice. And now you are expected to pick a few out of the 5000 various baby activities, the lack of which supposedly mark the child for life. So once again, can people self regulate and self filter? Sometimes I'm amazed that people's brains don't fry because of the sheer load of crap we force it to keep track of.

/But it would explain a lot if brains were fried//Scottish zombies would have the time of their unlife.

Further to my delightful post above - in the same way that you'd go to a group of nerds for the best, real world advice on a subject, go to a close-knit circle of mothers with an IQ higher than room temperature, who have all had several kids. They are baby nerds. You'll get honest, good, WORKING advice from people that have done it several times, cared every time and are smart enough to compare notes.

Lexx:Question, kind folk: is there a way to become a parent without basically signing up for 2+ years of sleep deprivation?

my 3 year old still wakes up once maybe 75% of the time and my 1 year old wakes up maybe twice per night on average occasionally they both sleep through the night but that's maybe once a week. You get use to it, a full nights sleep leaves me so freaking groggy I hate it, I'm at my best at maybe 4 hours sleep split into two two hour sessions. If I'm sleeping through the night I usually wake up around 1am or so and code for an hour or two then go back to bed and get up at 5. You'd be shocked at what you can get use to, on the other hand, my wife has a hard time coping so I handle the nights and let her sleep.

/mothers are ridiculously competitive, it's a real shame, they should be more supportive of each other.//there's no support for fathers anywhere, you're on your own.

The internet is a horrible resource for pregnant women. My wife and I are expecting our first and we have a hard and fast rule, never ever search on the internet for anything important. Case in point, My wife was having some pretty heavy cramping around week 8. The resources on the web ran from it's nothing to OMG YOU'RE MISCARRYING YOU'RE A HORRIBLE MOTHER.

Jim_Callahan:So... just talk to your parents and your in-laws about their issues raising you and your spouse instead of trawling the entire collective knowledge base on child rearing?

I don't know. My MIL thought that this "newfangled" formula was Da Devil, and that we should use her recipe she used on my husband that consisted of condensed sweetened milk, Karo syrup, water. Also, ibuprofen during teething was going to turn my son inside out, evidently, because "we didn't have those things when our kids were little."

I'd rather trawl the respectable, health-related sites as a basis to effective questioning at the doctor's office, and then go by instinct and common sense. "What to Expect When You're Expecting" is basically the Harlequin novel of the advice world.

Lexx:Question, kind folk: is there a way to become a parent without basically signing up for 2+ years of sleep deprivation?

Keep your baby well and plan its sleep properly. Treat colic properly, for God's sake, there's no need for a healthy baby to have it. Start feeding them a half-teaspoon of baby rice with their milk and sloooowly increase until they're basically on solids. Colic is intenstinal cramps because there's nothing solid in the guts to move, I'm surprised that adults have to be told this when almost all of us know what discomfort bad gas is, and how you bring it on easily with a liquid diet, high dairy, low fibre and all the other crap we expect a frigging baby to endure quietly. Don't be one of those idiots that leaves a baby with colic in the 21st century, if relieving your babies pain is not reason enough, you'll sleep because your baby can.

Other than general health and treating colic though, it's a baby. It doesn't know what sociable sleep times are. You can reduce the pain (I have a very caring and sensible friend that is still getting enough sleep to be functional, which is no mean feat as he has difficulties with a full sleep as it is) but at the end of the day, you've created a life and you will nees to wipe it's ass for years. Oh, and if its a girl in nappies and she gets diarrhea, you'll get to enjoy cleaning out your baby daughters labia. Did nobody ever tell you about that? I was laughing for ten minutes solid at the reaction of my friend when he had to do that for the first time. Priceless.